


the right words, in time (the mirrors lie, those aren’t my eyes Remix)

by Catznetsov



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Bodyswap, M/M, Masturbation, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-06
Updated: 2019-06-21
Packaged: 2020-01-05 15:41:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18369026
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catznetsov/pseuds/Catznetsov
Summary: When production thinks it looks as good as Ovechkin claims they are, they’re waved free. Ovechkin pops up, brushing off his knees, and doesn’t peek sideways. Sid has time to tug his black sweater over his head and folds it for something to do, before he thinks better.“Hey,” he says. One wild blue eye finds his through Ovechkin’s fringe. “Want to trade?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [saddestboner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddestboner/gifts).
  * Inspired by [the mirrors lie, those aren’t my eyes](https://archiveofourown.org/works/297633) by [saddestboner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saddestboner/pseuds/saddestboner). 



> Dear saddestboner—
> 
> Right off the bat I was fascinated by your story, the detail that Sid and Ovi never reached out to each other, and how long the swap lasted. I feel like by now I’m really prepared, when I wake up swapped, to call my own phone and go through a pat little conversation about who I am how we’ve swapped: I loved how your variation from other swap fics emphasized what Sid was feeling, and wanted to dig into those details! 
> 
> Several lines are stitched together from things people really said; I recommend not thinking too hard about timeline.

In the camera’s black eye neither of them look like much.

Sid hasn’t peeked sideways, but he can’t help checking their reflections in the lens, and he thinks that at least they have something uneasy in common. When someone turns the viewfinder around for them, though, Sid is struck by the color in their little selves’ cheeks, and then by Ovechkin shoving him gently out of the way to look himself, cooing at the production team’s work. Leaning down in front of Sid, the studio lights track across his cheeks and somehow turn from sharp white to sunshine on his skin.

“No, no, good!” he says when the photographer asks. “Or, you want one more? Like…Sid, over little. Yeah?” Sid moves where they put him, back a bit, Ovechkin still low, so he’s looking over dark curls.

“Look, good!” Ovechkin says to the writer in the corner, and sticks a warm elbow back into Sid’s ribs. “On ice, rivals. But for the league, for sure, partners.” Sid sighs, not entirely because of the elbow. God, that’s a slicker line than anything he’s thought up. One of his stumbles is probably going in the tagline of the inevitable article, but Ovechkin might’ve covered for them there. 

When production thinks it looks as good as Ovechkin claims they are, they’re waved free. Ovechkin pops up, brushing off his knees, and doesn’t peek sideways. Sid, hot from the lights, has time to tug his black sweater over his head. He folds it for something to do, before he thinks better.

“Hey,” he says. One wild blue eye finds his through Ovechkin’s fringe. “Want to trade?” 

Ovechkin turns the other eye on him, mouth flatly soft the way Sid’s starting to notice the Russian boys all do. Then he straightens, long hands crossing at his hips and drawing the white fabric up over his chest. He holds it out just like that, and Sid takes it as neatly as he can, their fingers just brushing, the fabric of the sweater between them. On second thought Sid has held his hand before, remembers the bones of it and the self-contained mountain-range of his knuckles, so why’s Sid acting like they don’t know each other now. That’s silly, isn't it—they just _barely_ know each other. 

He drops his own onto Ovechkin’s hand. Ovechkin crumples it immediately. It’s going in the back of his closet, probably, but Sid gave it a try. Then Ovechkin’s whole face crinkles at him. “Thank you Sid,” he says, rhythm almost like a kid who’s learning the phrase by rote, which of course he did. 

The sweep of his lower lip is so much fuller than the upper. It’s good, Sid thinks, maybe it’s good that this is just about his body. Sid’s seen older boys before and wanted something; he can live just fine without it.  

Two weeks later Sid wakes up in a pool of sunlight and sheets he doesn’t recognize, and his jersey’s tucked behind someone else’s suit coats.

 

 

“You watch the Pens game?” someone asks post-game, and when exactly would Sid have done that. He spent last night very busy microwaving dumplings and balancing with them on the couch, legs up on pillows above his heart so maybe one or the other would stop bothering him for a minute. It might not’ve even been on last night, they didn’t say, just thought of course he would know. 

“Uh, no,” he says. “Got our game to, um, do, so.” He can’t help the leading rise at the end like he’s asking a question, and he knows it sounds like ‘what happened?’ and not ‘why do you want us to care?’

“Sidney’s in the lead again,” someone else says, so that’s nice. Sid’s body can still do the one thing it knows how to do even without his brain, which is one thing more than Sid is managing over here.

“Nice,” he says, when it seems appropriate. “Of course—“ and the S sound catches between Ovechkin’s teeth. Sid stumbles. “—is very exciting, play like that in the League,” he tries, considering whether there’s any way he can look down at his own tongue, or the one he’s borrowing, anyway. But it only feels like what he’s already felt—he can say anything Ovechkin would say. He can’t say his own name.

 

 

Sid has a roommate now. It’s not completely horrible. 

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” he tells the hotel bedspread. Across half his field of vision the cotton print refracts wild teal and blue, and Sid thinks about his new bed at Mario’s, which hasn’t had the chance to become familiar yet.

The Capitals’ other Alexander pops the taffy out of his mouth, repeats himself, and then turns down the Russian techno. “Said ‘don’t know if I’m hungry,’” he enunciates, and Sid, horribly, follows every word. “Are you? Can we go somewhere?” 

“It’s one in the morning,” Sid says, and then, “I don’t know,” because of course Sid’s hungry. It’s been two weeks and Sid has been learning Ovechkin’s body, and most of what Ovechkin’s body thinks about is pasta. 

Ovechkin’s body also thinks in Russian. As long as Sid doesn’t think too much about it, he speaks Russian now. When he thinks, he doesn’t speak much of anything, the dissonance catching between his teeth.He’d trade not talking at all to know what people are saying around him, words he understands if everyone else in the room keeps quiet and he has time to listen and he isn’t aching too bad from the ice. Sid’s mind knows them all but it’s badly wrapped in Ovechkin’s like waxed paper, blurred and leaking at the corners. 

His roommate bites the candy again, and looks at him as pitifully as 200 pounds of Russian muscle can. Sid’s been learning from the mirror lately and the bruises he's been giving Ovechkin that that’s pretty sad. “McDonald’s?” he asks. 

“There was one on the corner, down Jackson Street,” Sid says. His roommate bounces up to get a coat, which is thinner than Sid’s dad would approve of. Russians, Sid supposes, although now he can hear the difference between a city and a provincial Russian accent, and the dregs of Ovechkin’s instincts has something there about different regions of the country that must mean something to somebody but Sid has no chance to understand. At least Ovechkin owns proper winter coats—it’s his jeans that are the issue. Sid mashes his face back into the pillow a few times, until his roommate comes back and sits on him.

Sid, in Ovechkin’s body, doesn’t immediately die. “Dude,” he says, or whatever the word for that is. “It’s two blocks, you can do it.”

He gets squeezed tighter for his trouble. “Which street?”

“Jackson,” Sid says impatiently, but his roommate only repeats it under his breath, sounding it out. “There’ll be signs, like…you can’t read.”

 “Promised you were going to teach me,” his roommate says into Ovechkin’s hair, and Sid thinks in an oddly final way that he really is in trouble, because he’d had no idea Ovechkin was the sort of person who would do that. 

 It’s not like Sid’s never bent curfew before: he knows he can and the world won’t end, it’s just easier when Marc-André is there to tug him where he wants to go. He doesn’t have Marc-André now, or Jack or Geno, but at the back of his borrowed brain there’s an outline of Alex growing brighter. He spends too much of the night in a McDonald’s in Calgary, reading illuminated letters off the dollar menu, because Alex would.

 

 

Sid meets Marc-André’s eyes down the ice, and only gets bared teeth from his best friend. He meets his own as Alex bends into the face-off position, and Alex looks and lets Sid look at him for as long as they’re allowed to before with a shake of dark curls he has to look away. 

 Absolutely no one is going to let Sid near enough to touch, or talk.

 “Hey, G—” Sid yells, after. “Zheh—um, yeah,” he yells, and trips over the dissonance again. 

 Geno draws himself up to his full height. He looks a little like a movie villain when he does that, and Sid misses him like wild, less for the short months they were getting to know each other than the time now they’ve missed.

 “Alex,” Geno says, rather grandly. “What you want?”

 “Hey,” Sid tries. “Well, um. How you been? How is he?”

 He’s expecting to be told to fuck himself, ironic as that is right now. He’s not expecting Geno’s face to go dark for real, or to turn around without even a parting shove.

 

 

“If this is some kind of punishment, I get it,” Sid says. “What I had before, it was fine, and I shouldn’t have—assumed, like it could be better, or—complained—and I’m sorry.” 

 Alex’s face in the mirror doesn’t seem impressed. It might help if Sid could figure out how to shave it a little more consistently. He sighs, and gets a piece of tissue to blot Alex’s jaw. The pads of his fingers drag along Alex’s stubble, and Sid has to gentle them. He would never hurt Alex, except all the little ways he keeps doing it accidentally. 

 Alex starts growing a beard, and Sid puts up with the teasing. It’s better than any of Alex’s teammates minding that Sid still isn’t scoring for them as consistently as he knows these hands should, and Sid thinks it looks nice. 

 

It’s still about Alex’s body. Sid slides his shirt over his shoulders at night in front of the bathroom mirror, guides his palms up his sides and back down again. 

If Alex were really here, Sid would push him back against the wall, and maybe he’d try to tell the raucous energy under Alex’s skin to let go, or maybe he’d just get lost in the gold of it. Sid, as himself, isn’t exactly smooth. He gets dragged deep in things he knows, and if Alex lets him he thinks he might forget to go anywhere, circling his fingers over the familiar rise and fall of Alex’s chest. 

He can do that now, picking out scars he never would have seen in glossy promo photos. Probably they edit those out. He looks and looks in the mirror, and wants to do something more. 

Alex’s body is capable of fiercer tension and gentling further than Sid thinks he ever has in his own. Maybe if Alex knew, he’d let Sid play him back and forth between them. 

He pushes one hand down, over the sensitive skin of Alex’s belly to find the weight of him. The rest of what Alex’s body thinks about, besides or sometimes at the same time as pasta, is sex. He’s hot between his thighs, through his briefs, and when Sid rubs a little over the fabric his thumb slides, getting wet. He gets like this before and after every game, wakes Sid up to find he’s tangled in blankets and working to find any kind of touch. And that’s not the real Alex’s fault, not his fault Sid wants this louder than the voice of his conscience, but at least since Sid gave in to touching him they’ve been scoring again. 

Sid rubs the palm of his hand over Alex’s briefs, and Alex gasps in the mirror. Sid slips them down, gathers slick, wraps his fingers around Alex’s dick. Sid’s always been quiet, but Alex’s chest rumbles with a caged moan.

He touches Alex’s mouth, thumb slicking over that fat lower lip. He runs his mouth between the peaks of Alex’s knuckles until one drags at that lip, parts them and fits between his teeth. He imagines it’s his own hand on Alex, and Alex making that sound for him.

  

It helps having a best friend like Sasha, who covers for Sid as Alex’s flaws by being louder and weirder whenever Sid must be making him worry, but that only buys Sid so long.

 “Why,” little Nicklas Backstrom enunciates, “you acting normal?”

 “Excuse me?” Sid tries.

 “No,” Backstrom says. “You been all polite since I come here. No hug me, no Russia kiss me, no telling me girls like boys in tighter jeans.”

 So, what, that a crime now?” Sid says.

 “You’re  _Alex Ovechkin_ ,” Backstrom says, and Sid’s got to admit, he’s got a point.

 “I don’t know,” he says, the English coming clearer than it has in a while. “Don’t know, I’m—“ and he still can’t say it. “Don’t know I am.”

 Backstrom looks at him through one vicious green eye, then the other, and the birdlike gesture reminds Sid so much of Alex that he wants to bite something. This isn’t how anything is supposed to be. “You not,” he says, slow. “You not Alex.”

 “No,” Sid tries, flexing his jaw. It’s nothing useful, but Alex’s mouth knows the shape of that word okay. “Sorry, it’s been so long. I don’t know—”

 “Whatever,” Backstrom says, looking to Sasha for confirmation, and Sid knows he hasn’t been convincing but he doesn’t know what to do with the look of relief between Sasha’s eyebrows. These aren’t supposed to be his friends. “Annoying. So we fix you, you explain me what the fuck after.”

 “I’m sorry?” Sid says. “I can’t, I haven’t—“

 “Ja,” Nicklas says, frosty. “Before, you don’t have me.”

 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Kept coming back to this one in my head

 

When they all make the first line full time Nicky drives them out to a department store in Friendship Heights, Sid tucked in the passenger side and Sasha hanging peaceably half out the back window like a dog, grinning at the feeling of the rushing air. The open road and the start of summer takes up space around them, and Sid doesn’t have to fill any.

They pad through the air-conditioning to a jeweler’s display, chrome and gold refracting reflections behind glass. Staff are considering whether to make eye contact with them. Sid is wearing a t-shirt that says SEX AND LOVE ARE THE FUTURE which smells like Sasha’s American Spirits, and he could afford probably any of the pieces in here but he still feels like he should apologize for that. Nicky looks even less happy, but he stomps up to the counter and goes through the whole rigamarole, and then they’re paying, and leaving with the pendants he’d ordered.

Sid thought their numbers would look heavy in gold, but they don’t, really. All their shoulders are getting broader; he’s the only one who hasn’t earned it.

On the way back to the parking lot he gets ice cream, because the two-seventy-five still feels real, and because he can eat ice cream whenever he wants in public.

“What if I’m not even here next year?” he asks around the end of it. His friends don’t know who he is: they won’t know how to miss him, if they would. Some days he thinks they forget he’s not their Alex. Most days they think he’s Alex who’s lost his memories, Alex cursed not to think like Alex, someone who never existed before Alex disappeared and some new personality woke up in his head, anyone in the world who’s somehow switched with Alex. Not knowing what’s wrong is the hardest part, which is also true about their power play.

 Nicky jingles his keys pointedly. “What if I let Sasha drive us home now? We all gonna go someday.”

“Nick-yah, be nice,” Sasha says, baring his weird Chiclet teeth.

“Or what, you won’t break any law, to show me?” Nicky says.

Sasha keeps smiling at him, stretching past the point when they all know Nicky squirms, and then simply sets a hand on each of Nicky’s exposed sides and lifts him into the air like a toddler.

Sid finishes the point of his cone, watching them slap it out, and cleans his fingers with the tissue paper the shop had tucked his necklace in. “Bad Sasha,” he says, and picks them both up, because Alex would have done. It goes okay until Nicky catches him on Alex’s upper arm, where he’s surprisingly ticklish, and tips them all over into the grassy verge. Someone puts an elbow into someone else’s ribs, and Sasha’s knee is planted on Sid’s thigh, necklace almost hitting Sid in the nose, Nicky’s breath bubbling giggles into his hair.

“No, best,” Sasha says triumphantly. “Best, best, best,” and Sid thinks he’s right, maybe they are.

They’re not.

People keep asking about the Penguins, and Sid can’t say _why_ he’s not watching as he stews in Moscow, which becomes a problem, because Sasha does, and then Alex’s phone won’t stop ringing.

Sid gets an apologetic text that has nothing to do with the PR bloodshed in his voicemail, and hits call. “Were you helping?” he demands. “Sasha, the hell, do you think you’re helping, going after—“ and his name bites his mouth closed.

“He _is_  dull,” Sasha says, chewing what sounds like a hamburger. “He’s good, sure. He skates like nothing. Like he’s trying not to look like anything or give anybody reason to want to look at him.”

Sid remembers Geno skating away from him, protective fury in the hard curve of his mouth. Alex has been playing Sid just like Sid is playing him, and maybe that’s what Alex really thinks of Sid, or maybe that’s all Alex’s spirit can string together between the neat lines of Sid’s life.

“So, what, whatever. What do you think _telling_ them that is going to do—”

“You don’t have to look at you,” Sasha says. 

“I, sorry?” Sid says.

“You promised we’d win,” Sasha says. Sid knows he’s known Alex longer than anybody, he’s always had a harder time remembering Sid isn't who Alex used to be. “And you never have to look at you after.”

“Of course we’re going to win,” Sid says. “Someday.” It’s the one thing he knows he and Alex, and Nicky and Marc-Andre, Geno and Jack, everyone he doesn’t recognize and who don’t know him, all have in common.

“Not the Cup, dumbass. Juniors. You promised we’d win, and when your shoulder got fucked you cried until Zhenya ran to get me. But when coach say to, you clean up and you go right back out again, just to shake his hand. You don’t have a good hand to use but you won’t let him think you’re rude so you keep smiling. You don’t know how fucked it looks, because you don’t have to look at you.”

That’s hardly fair to Alex: Sid had taken his hand for the first time and held it, vulnerable bones close under his skin, and only looked at his lower lip, and only thought about what Sid already knew.

Sasha finishes his fries pointedly into Sid’s silence, then hangs up on him.

Sid spends another round of the playoffs he’s not watching slouching around Moscow, until Alex’s brother tattles on him to their mother, who somehow towers _up_ at him.

“I’m fine,” Sid promises her, and sees the wrinkle between her eyebrows as she looks at Alex just like his friends do.

“I don’t care if you’re not,” she says, and sits with him. Sid thinks if Alex were here he’d lean into her and cry until he felt better, but that’s never been Sid. When he feels bad crying only makes him feel gross on top of it, so he plays with Taylor instead. But his sister and her son are an ocean away, so they only keep a kind of vigil together, and the next day Sid takes the train out east. Sasha catches him before his bag hits the platform.

“I know you don’t want to get mad about how it is,” he says into Sid’s hair. “But we can still hate him, or whatever.” Hugging him back soaks Sid in country air and cigarette smoke, and he thinks about missing Nova Scotia.

“That’s fair,” Sid says. He doesn’t want to be mad about the way it’s been made; rivals, when in a different time and place he and Alex could be partners. “Just, next year, if A—if your best friend says he’s okay, really, maybe you could stop hating him?” He doesn’t have to be watching to know that Alex and Geno, with Marc-André behind them, might win it all, and maybe that will be the magic it takes to put both of them back in their place. Maybe, after that, Alex will want to forgive Sid.

“Whatever,” Sasha says, but in the morning he puts on the tinny broadcast of the game and makes fun of Sid’s real hair while Sid lies across him on the couch and watches Alex’s little face on screen, a shock of color against the endless ice. They turn it off sometime in the second when they get hungry and then feel like swimming, and the rest of the month rolls by like that.

Sid’s sitting at the rippling edge of the lake, skimming his toes, and then inside he hears Alex’s phone start to ring again. He only ambles back in to answer when Sasha yells that one of them is Nicky’s number.

“You're okay,” Nicky says, first thing, and then he texts a picture of the morning paper.

It says, SIDNEY CROSBY: MISSING.


End file.
